


Hands

by epiattic



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Actors, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Celebrities, M/M, Mutual Pining, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-21 22:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13152975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epiattic/pseuds/epiattic
Summary: Keith landed the role, but will he ever be able to play the part of Shiro’s boyfriend?





	Hands

**Author's Note:**

> happy holidays to my secret santa recipient, Chelsea! i’m honestly not very good at things that you asked for, but i gave the celebrity au a shot! i hope it fits what you wanted enough and that you enjoy it :)  
> a huge shout-out to the cotton candy & lion pride discord server for keeping me motivated on this fic every time i was struggling. and an especially big thanks to majo and zap for looking this over for me super super last-minute! you guys are honestly the best <3  
> merry christmas, everyone!!

“It’s good to have you back.”

Keith said this with his arms looped loose around Shiro’s neck and his gaze on Shiro’s eyes. In their warm gray depths he could see Shiro’s affection in the way his stare softened, the way they stared back into Keith’s face like he was something worth looking at. Their eye contact held, warm and tender.

“It’s good to be back,” Shiro replied, in a tone quiet and personal and fond. His thumbs found Keith’s hipbones, his thumbs sliding against them and his fingers curling over to hold him in place, like he was afraid of getting separated.

Keith tilted his head to draw closer to Shiro, noses nearly brushing, Shiro’s breath brushing against his cheek. Here he felt the words bubble to his lips, natural and unhesitating. It was time to say it.

“I love you.”

A smile pulled at the corner of Shiro’s mouth, helplessly adoring.

“I love you too,” Shiro replied.

And for a long moment of bliss and stillness Keith stayed there, in Shiro’s arms, feeling the smile stretch across his own face, the joy of the words exchanged settling in his chest. Shiro was warm where they touched, and gentle in a way that no one had ever been with him before, and when he smiled like that, he was so handsome that the cavity of Keith’s chest felt full of an uncontainable but trapped bird, warm and light and fluttering. Keith sighed.

“ _Cut_!”

Immediately Shiro stepped away, breaking Keith’s hold on him. Keith let his arms flop to his sides as he deliberately sidled in the other direction. Neither of them looked at each other.

Because both of them knew this wasn’t real.

This was obvious. Something that should be taken for granted, in fact. Actors act. It’s in the definition. Everything they do is made up and recited from a script, written for them. It’s all pretend. Whatever warmth Shiro showered on him while the cameras were rolling wasn’t for Keith. It wasn’t even _from_ Shiro. It was from Shiro’s character Sven, and it was directed towards Keith’s character Akira. It had nothing to do with Shiro. It had nothing to do with Keith.

“That was a great shot, boys!” Coran’s voice rang out over the set. “Let’s run it four or five more times. I need to get the angle just right!”

“You’ve got it Coran,” Shiro answered easily, and then turned back towards Keith. His casual grin was like a bolt to Keith’s heart. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Keith replied, even though his heart was telling him _no_. How many times could he tell Shiro to his face that he loved him in one afternoon? How many times could he feel the wind being knocked straight out of him when Coran called for them to stop?

If Keith gritted his teeth and weathered it, it turned out that twice more was the answer. After that, Coran called them to a much-needed break. With a bottle of water and maybe someplace he could quietly lay down in mind, Keith stalked off set. He didn’t get far before Coran’s voice was calling after him, “ _Hands!_ ”

Oh. Right.

Shiro’s footsteps pattered after him, and then Keith felt his hand being scooped up and wrapped into one much bigger than his own.

“Can’t forget about this, right?” Shiro said, giving him a squeeze, which felt like a direct squeeze around his heart.

Yeah. Couldn’t forget about that. About the way Shiro’s hand felt almost completely engulfing his own.

It had now been a number of months since Keith’s agent had given him an excited phone call to break the news to him. That huge role he’d auditioned for? The lead in that big budget film? Yeah, it was his. For an up-and-coming star, it was a pretty big deal.

At the time he couldn’t really have cared less that the other lead was award-winning actor Takashi Shirogane. Though quickly making a name for himself among the big stars, Keith wasn’t one to mentally catalogue information about his peers. Regardless of who he was working with, he went in with his lines memorized, acted to the best of his own ability, and only cared about his co-workers if they were ruining the take. There were already people out there saying that this was his biggest flaw as an actor; though talented on his own, sometimes his apathy towards his partners bled into his on-camera exchanges.

Coran, the director of this emotional trainwreck that was eventually supposed to become a major blockbuster, must’ve caught word of that somewhere. As a result, Keith’s first day on set went down a little bit like this:

Keith had just barely introduced himself to Takashi Shirogane. Shiro, as he liked to be called, was admittedly extremely handsome, somehow even more so in person than on the covers of magazines and in the movie he starred in Keith had watched of on DVD the night before. His acting skills were decent, but he was perhaps more valued for his gorgeous physique, his broad chest and shoulders, his dangerously good-looking face, his genuine, open, charismatic personality, and his insistence on doing all of his own stunts in action movies (an insistence which Keith both shared and grudgingly admired). They were embarking on the beginnings of small talk when Coran had approached them with a look in his eye that Keith would quickly learn was a dangerous one.

In this masterpiece of a space opera they were now contractually obligated to have a part in creating, Shiro’s character Sven and Keith’s character Akira were on a level of _in love_ that Keith was fairly certain could only be achieved through Hollywood farce. This was a fact that could be gleaned from even so much as glancing at the script, but Keith had already gotten to know the story backwards and forwards. Sven and Akira’s love was perhaps the centerpiece of the entire movie.

Such was cause for in-depth, hands-on preparation. To ensure that Sven and Akira had the right amount of chemistry in front of the cameras, Shiro and Keith apparently had to have the right amount of chemistry off of them. Coran’s edict was strict and unyielding. It was an exercise in method acting, as well as in Keith’s tolerance, patience, and good-will. It manifested as one inflexible heavily-enforced rule. If Shiro and Keith were in the same place at the same time, whenever possible, they _must_ be holding hands.

This meant that Keith spent his breaks one-handed, the other occupied by Shiro’s. This meant during makeup their chairs were parked next to each other and the artists had to navigate around the arms that bridged them together, too. If they were practicing their lines together, they did it linked by the fingers. While the cameras were getting set up, while the lighting was being fixed. If there was ever a moment of downtime, any time when the cameras weren’t rolling, Keith’s hand had to be fastened to Shiro’s, or Coran’s scolding would come shrill and rapid.

That was fine. This was what acting was, right?

It started a little awkward. Keith was rarely physically affectionate with those he wasn’t close with, and as he wasn’t very close with anyone really, the sensation of another person’s skin against his own was foreign and disconcerting. The first day, it felt like his hand was burning where it touched Shiro’s, the skin crawling as his unfortunate, sweaty palm came into contact with Shiro’s. While their hands were in each other’s, Keith couldn’t make eye contact without a blush and anxiety flaring in his gut. The second day was marginally better, with speech between them coming a little bit easier. By the third, Shiro had learned how to make Keith laugh and how to get the nervous tension to drain from his shoulders, and he took full advantage of that knowledge. By the fourth, Keith found himself sharing intimate details of his childhood with someone he’d known for less than 100 hours.

And on the fifth, Shiro smiled down at him, gave his hand a brief squeeze, and Keith knew he was completely, utterly fucked.

Of course, this combination of factors led to situations like the following:

Anywhere that Keith went, Shiro followed. Water breaks. Lunch and dinner. When Keith was filming alone, Shiro waited patiently behind the cameras and watched with the slightest smile. Keith looked up, caught sight of that smile, and all of his lines immediately disappeared from his head. His focus wavered whenever he saw the little smile on Shiro’s face when he watched him act. Keith began to make a point of never looking around while he was preparing to shoot, lest he become a babbling, idiotic mess.

Or,

“I’m going to get another water bottle,” Shiro said. “Do you want one?”

Sitting here in wardrobe waiting for shooting to start was thirsty work, apparently. Keith kicked his empty water bottle over, and it rattled and rolled around the foot of his chair.

“Yeah, sure,” Keith replied.

So Shiro disentangled their hands, and in a motion that felt more automatic and casual than anything else, leaned down and pressed a kiss to Keith’s forehead before getting up and heading towards the fridge without a backwards glance.

Keith reached a quivering hand towards first his forehead and then his warming cheeks. He was so distracted by the burning feeling working its way up his face that he forgot he wasn’t alone until he heard the snort of the special effects engineer they’d been hanging out with across from him. Keith glanced up with a glare.

“So what’s that about?” Matt asked, smirking.

Keith looked away. “It’s just acting,” he grumbled.

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”

Or,

Somewhere in the background Keith was vaguely aware of something saying something. It was important. Someone said something important. Maybe. What did he know. His brain was unable to process, foggy, dizzy, and slow. Everything in his perception had narrowed down into a single point of awareness. A pair of lips. A warm hand on his back. A breathy, quiet moan sighed into his mouth.

Shiro was kissing him.

Yes, Shiro was kissing him. There was a tongue in his mouth, and it belonged to Shiro. Shiro’s hands were impossibly big. Hot. In his hair, on his neck. Keith sighed and shifted and—

Someone tapped Keith on the shoulder, and Keith’s world expanded, _hard_. With a wet sound he broke apart from Shiro, taking a half-step back, and looked around wildly. A PA was standing beside him looking sheepish, and jerked his head towards Coran.

“ _Cut_!” Something in Coran’s tone told Keith that this was not the first time the word had been shouted.

Shiro cleared his throat. Keith turned away and wandered a few steps to hide his reddening face. The set was quiet, except for the two of them, everyone watching them like something of interest they’d spotted through the viewfinder of a microscope.

With a nervous laugh, Shiro came up behind him and took Keith’s hand. Keith worried for a second that Shiro could feel how wildly his heart was beating through it, but Shiro just offered him a quirk of his lips as Coran called them for a break before they would have to shoot the scene again.

Keith looked down, unable to meet Shiro’s eyes for very long.

But Shiro had kissed him, right?

 _No,_ thought Keith, feeling his palm sweating as he trailed after Shiro to grab some water. _Sven had kissed Akira_.

 

* * *

 

A rare day off found Keith and Shiro at the supermarket.

Keith was pushing the shopping cart. He had wanted Shiro to do it. Insisted, in fact. But Shiro claimed Keith was better at steering and control. That left Shiro to be the one grabbing items off the shelves and tossing them into the cart, while Keith watched on in horror. That aside, this would-be scene of domestic bliss was only marred by two facts: one, Shiro was wearing sunglasses, a beanie, and a face mask indoors to hide his identity from overbearing fans, and two, this wasn’t domestic at all.

They were just hanging out. Just two co-workers, spending their time off together. To work on their chemistry, or something like that. As they had been doing often lately, by going to coffee, or grabbing dinner at nice restaurants after shooting, or watching movies together in Shiro’s penthouse until Keith fell asleep on the couch. You know, that kind of normal co-star stuff. It was just work.

They rolled up to the check-out and Keith started unloading. Shiro grabbed a tabloid off the magazine rack and huffed a laugh.

“Hey, look at this,” he said, pivoting towards Keith.

Keith glanced up in interest, laying his coke down on the conveyor belt before drawing close to Shiro. The rag he was waving around with his prosthetic was the kind made of paper so thin it looked suitable to blow your nose with, if not for the photograph that spread its blurry way across the cover. Big red text that looked like it could have been a middle schooler’s word art creation named the magazine, while equally subtle black text proclaimed, “ _COSTARS TO LOVERS?_ ”

Shiro flipped the magazine open before Keith could examine the photo on the cover, but he had a pretty good feel on who the subjects were. His hypothesis was proven correct when Shiro dangled a colorful spread before his eyes. Although poor quality and taken at a distance, Keith’s unruly black mop and the white shock of Shiro’s bangs peeking out from under a baseball cap were impossible to miss. In the photo, they were crossing a street downtown, likely on any of their countless coffee or lunch outings. Keith was walking beside Shiro— _too close_ —with a hand curled possessively around his bicep while smiling up at him.

“ _Are Keith Kogane and Takashi Shirogane getting cozy on set?_ ” asked the headline.

Well, the paparazzi had one thing right at least. There was something decidedly unplatonic about the way that Keith was looking at Shiro.

“This is pretty funny,” Shiro said. “They think we’re actually dating.”

Keith looked up at Shiro again, trying to find some trace of anything in his expression besides amusement, but he couldn’t. Shiro was looking down at the tabloid, grinning at the fuzzy pictures and sensationalist wording. There was some text accompanying the photos, no doubt theorizing all about Shiro and Keith’s apparently passionate and active love life.

Well, if this was how they appeared to the public, they were doing their jobs at least.

“Yeah,” Keith replied. “Hilarious.”

Shiro tossed the tabloid onto the conveyor belt behind Keith’s coke. When Keith gave that a questioning glance, all Shiro replied with was little smile and a raise of his shoulder that constituted a shrug.

 

* * *

 

It was pure selfishness to think that maybe, possibly, Shiro wanted him too.

Held hands and overlong kisses on the set of a movie are one thing. Genuine feelings are a completely different matter. Shiro had been in this business for far longer than Keith, so his ability to separate his actual wants from his characters’ desires was probably far more stable than Keith’s. That was fair. But what it meant was this: Keith didn’t have a shot.

It was the last day of filming together. They weren’t done. Keith still had a few more scenes to shoot with other actors. But as far as Sven and Akira went, today was the end.

“Last day, huh?” Shiro said to Keith when he arrived on set in the morning. Automatically he made a grab for Keith’s hand, who allowed their fingers to fold together unthinkingly. “Let’s make it count.”

Keith didn’t need the reminder.

He considered it. He really did. There were two or three times over the course of the day that he bit his tongue to keep from saying anything that he shouldn’t. He knew he could take the easy way out and suggest in a friendly, completely platonic way that they didn’t need to stop hanging out just because the movie was over. But this felt like an act of cowardice and selfishness to him, and an unfair thing to Shiro.

It had to be all or nothing. A date. Keith had been toying with the idea for weeks, but of course there was no indication that this was ever anything other than a job to Shiro. How ridiculously would he feel finding out that the feelings he’d been developing over the course of their time together were one-sided? How would Shiro feel discovering that the man he’d been holding hands and making out with for the camera was genuine in his affection?

Keith had little desire to find out.

And so the day sped by. And Keith, well-aware that it was now or never, picked never.

After what was objectively a long day but felt to Keith like it slipped between the cracks of his fingers, he was left with nothing but the friendly smile that Shiro gave him when he meandered towards him after they were told they were free to leave.

“So that’s it, huh?” Shiro said.

“Yeah,” Keith replied, doing his best approximation of a smile in return. He didn’t think it was very successful.

“It’s been good working with you,” Shiro said, the formal words sounding natural and friendly on his tongue. Like it really had been good working with Keith for him.

“You too,” Keith replied.

“So, um.” Shiro forced his grin wider and looked away, in a show that even Keith could tell looked like nerves. For an actor, Shiro couldn’t hide genuine emotion very well, and somehow, even now, Keith found it hopelessly endearing.

“So?” Keith prodded.

“So….” Shiro trailed off, and then looked back at Keith with that grin. “See you around.”

It wasn’t disappointment that Keith felt, because disappointment would imply that Keith felt hope in the first place.

“See you around,” he replied.

 

* * *

 

Keith had been through breakups. One or two really bad ones, if he was to be honest. He knew what that felt like. He was familiar with the primal ache involved. That physical, desperate urge to be close to that person still, even if it was an impossibility. To know that kind of closeness with someone again. To hold their hand, to feel the softness of their lips and to hear the way their voice reverberated in your ribcage like no one else’s could. Keith had felt heartbreak. He was aquatinted with that ache in his chest.

But how could he feel that way, if those things were never really his to begin with?

 

* * *

 

Keith had been invited to the interview, but he had a meeting with his agent that evening and audition the next day and simply more things than he could reasonably juggle in one week, so the popular talk show host was to interrogate Shiro alone. That was fine. Keith didn’t perform too well on live TV anyway. He wasn’t charismatic. He always said the wrong thing at the wrong time, whereas Shiro always knew just what to say.

So instead Keith watched the interview over his lunch break. He told himself it wasn’t just to see Shiro’s face and hear Shiro’s voice. He told himself that the feelings—the _crush_ , because that’s all it was—were fading, and that it was fine that Shiro would forever be just the person he’d hung out with during filming.

The studio audience went wild when Shiro came on stage, his smile wide and heartbreakingly handsome, his prosthetic hand waving to first the crowd, and then the cameras. He came to a white leather loveseat and sat down across from the host, Nyma.

They greeted each other, bantered, gave the live audience a few laughs. Shiro was more charming than ever, even through a TV screen, and Keith felt his stomach flutter just looking at him on screen. Nyma ran through some basic questions with him, just simple stuff about the plot of the movie. Shiro talked it up, made it sound like something really worth watching.

Then, Nyma got a certain look on her face. Keith could tell from the way her smile curved that he probably wasn’t going to like the next question.

“So, Shiro,” Nyma purred. “Tell us. Just like your character Sven, it looks like you found some romance on set too. Someone named…Keith Kogane, maybe?”

            Keith’s eyes widened. His grip tightened on the remote, and his eyes focused in on Shiro. Sitting on his white leather couch, an embarrassed pink colored his cheeks, making his scar stand out.

“Oh, no,” Shiro laughed. “We were always just friends.”

Keith stood, hit the power button on the TV remote, and left the room.

 

* * *

 

Months passed.

Keith kept waiting to get over it. He threw himself into new projects. Made some new movies. Kissed his other characters’ love interests. He kept thinking that the ache in his chest whenever he thought about Shiro would fade. That he would get tired of feeling his attention jump when he saw Shiro’s smile on a TV program or heard his voice in a movie playing in the background.

But it never went away. And Keith had missed his chance forever. That was just something he would have to live with, because there was no way that it ever could have worked out between them anyway. Not when for Shiro, all the warmth he had shown Keith was just part of his job. Not when, for Keith, he knew that no one would ever _really_ show him the kind of love that Sven had shown Akira.

And then came the invitation to the premiere.

* * *

 

If you said that Shiro looked glorious on the red carpet it would be unfitting and an affront to Keith, personally. There were no words to describe what that man looked like in a suit, his hair slicked back and a friendly smile fixed on his face. He was all shoulder and strength when he stepped out of his limo, joining the other actors as they took pictures and greeted each other. When his eyes landed on Keith he gave him a flicker of his fingers that sent Keith’s heartrate soaring.

Keith had brought Lance as his plus one on the grounds that they held a long-respected tradition of inviting each other to events when they had no one else to bring. Inside the theater they sat down in their seats, Keith elbowing Lance in the gut in return for some whining that he didn’t want to be subjected to seeing Keith’s face on a big screen nonstop for the next two hours.

“You shouldn’t have agreed with come with me then,” Keith was replying when a wide shadow appeared over Lance’s shoulder.

Keith’s eyes hit the newcomer at the waist, and then traveled up and up _and up_ until he was craning his neck to look up into the face of one glorious, brilliant Takashi Shirogane.

“Oh, hey,” he said to Keith, and then swiveled to tell a strikingly gorgeous woman who had followed him down the row, “These are our seats.”

Keith managed a greeting through his suddenly-dry mouth, but Shiro was paying more attention to getting himself seated just on the other side of Lance. Keith hadn’t realized he was staring until Shiro turned back towards him, leaning around Lance to catch his eye.

“It’s been awhile,” Shiro said. “How’ve you been?”

Keith shrugged. “Same as always. You?”

“Alright.” Shiro smiled, and gestured towards Lance between them in a way that looked intensely casual. “Your date?”

Lance brayed a laugh. “ _God_ no. I would never date anyone with hair looking like that.”

“This is my _friend_ Lance,” Keith introduced dryly.

Shiro extended a hand. “Nice to meet you, Lance.”

“You too,” Lance replied, and took the hand to give it a warm shake. “Took us long enough to meet. I’ve been wondering about the guy who the tabloids all said was dating my best friend.”

Keith watched for Shiro’s reaction, but it was merely an untelling and good-natured laugh. So instead he peeked around Shiro towards the woman on his other side, a shapely, beautiful woman with thick silvery hair and striking blue eyes. “ _Your_ date?”

“Oh, no.” Shiro smiled. “This is my friend, Allura.”

 _Friend_. Friend most likely did not mean lover. Keith knew that from personal experience. Some roaring, growling thing inside of him was soothed, even though he knew he’d had no right to have an opinion on Shiro’s personal life in the first place.

“If that’s the case,” Lance said, and though he was facing towards Shiro as he said it, Keith could _hear_ the eyebrow wiggle in his voice, “why don’t you two sit together and let me sit next to the beautiful lady?”

Keith watched over Lance’s shoulder as Shiro and Allura exchanged glances and a shrug.

“Sure,” said Shiro, and suddenly Lance was replaced by a wide chest and a face that was so handsome it hurt to look at.

“Hey,” Shiro said again, much softer between them.

Keith’s heart missed its cue to beat for a second.

“Hey,” he replied.

Further conversation was prevented by the lights in the theater dimming. There were some speeches, Coran thanking everyone for coming or something like that, but Keith didn’t hear a word of it because his skin felt like it was vibrating. Shiro was close enough that Keith could touch him if he wanted to. If he leaned over he could hear him breathing, or feel his body heat. He was real and alive next to Keith, and Keith could feel it as an ache in the marrow of each of his bones.

The movie started. Keith couldn’t tell you what was happening on screen. He’d said the damn lines himself, acted them out in full, but his retention of the film was steadily nearing zero percent like a high schooler’s knowledge of their calculus class as the year progresses. Rather than his own form on screen, what was holding his attention was this: Shiro’s shoulders tensing every time he appeared on screen, as if embarrassed by his own appearance. Shiro shifting his weight in his seat. Shiro leaning over every so often to whisper something in Keith’s ear like, “The music really adds something, huh?” or, “Why didn’t you tell me how weird my delivery of that line was?” or, “Really nice job on that scene, Keith,” with his voice deep and breathy against Keith’s ear.

And, more than all of that, Shiro’s left hand, pale and large, standing out in bright contrast against his dark pant leg in Keith’s peripheral vision.

Keith shifted in his seat. He schooled his thoughts into focus and looked at the screen. He vaguely registered that Shiro wasn’t in this scene before his mind was drifting downwards again. To Shiro’s hand.

Shiro’s hand. Keith missed Shiro’s hands. So warm and large against his own, fingers slotting between his in a way that felt natural and comfortable.

Shiro didn’t miss Keith’s hands. If Shiro missed Keith’s hands, they would be holding hands right now. Keith couldn’t be that self-centered to believe that the way Shiro’s fingers drummed against his own thigh meant he was as preoccupied with the idea of holding Keith’s hand as Keith was with the idea of holding Shiro’s. That how he stopped every so often to wipe his palm was in preparation of something.

What scene was this? Keith tried to follow the movements of the actors, the way their mouths moved with their words. He saw nothing, heard nothing. Only Shiro’s hand.

_It’s not yours it’s not yours it’s not_

He moved before he could stop himself. The movement was as unexpected as it was quick. One second he was clutching the armrest, the next he’d grabbed Shiro’s hand right off his thigh and was holding the palm tight against his own.

His heart stuttered and thundered. He hadn’t _meant_ to do that, but it was irreversible now. In a fit of rashness he’d thrown the plate at the wall; it had shattered. No reassembly of the pieces could put them back together in the way they once were. He couldn’t take it back. He could only wait for Shiro’s reaction.

But Shiro didn’t react. Not really. His hand settled down into Keith’s, but the grip was loose. Although unseeing, Keith kept his eyes trained on the screen. He couldn’t risk a glance at Shiro right now. Was his palm sweaty? Could Shiro feel the beat of his pulse in the heel of his hand? Keith had no idea, and he was getting to the part of acting-before-thinking that he hated: the aftermath, where his actions actually had consequences.

Shiro didn’t want this. If Shiro had wanted this, he would have said something. It wasn’t too late to play it off as a joke.

Shiro’s hand shook Keith off, and Keith’s heart stopped in his chest.

He slid his hand back into his own lap, hardening himself against the feeling of disappointment that tried to fight its way into his throat and his eyes. He ignored it in favor of finding himself on the screen. He bit back the urge to throw a fit at that actor.

In his peripherals, Shiro was shifting in his seat again. Keith refused to pay it any mind, even as Shiro yawned and stretched his arms high above his head.

A warm weight settled across Keith’s shoulders. Shiro’s hand gripped his far bicep, tugging him closer, before he let his arm relax around Keith, Keith tucked into his hold. Keith’s heart jumpstarted in his chest, and he was so glad for the dark cover of the theater, because he was sure his face had never been such a bright red.

“Sorry,” Shiro breathed in his ear. “I’ve just always wanted to do that. Too much?”

“No,” Keith whispered, too quick. “No, I—. No.”

“Cool,” Shiro replied.

By the time Keith’s heart had slowed, by the time the urge to grin wildly had decreased to a simmer, by the time he didn’t have to clench his hands into fists to stop himself from openly turning to stare at Shiro, even though Shiro was also on the screen in front of him, he realized that the film was nearing its end. He _knew_ this scene coming up, he knew it intimately well. There had only been a few takes of it but the feeling of it had lived on somewhere nestled between his lungs.

It was all too visible in his eyes on-screen; this wasn’t acting. The music in the theater crested. The characters crashed together in an emotional embrace. But there was no scripting to the way that Keith looked at Shiro. There was nothing Coran could have told him that would have given him that expression, no way anyone could have coached him to soften his gaze just like that.

And, to his surprise, he discovered the expression was not one-sided. As the character of Akira wound his arms around the neck of Sven, the brightness in his expression belonged to Keith. Likewise, the affection that unfurled in Sven’s eyes did not belong to him, but to his actor.

Keith turned to look at Shiro, the _real_ Shiro, sitting beside him, in the blue glow of the screen, and found that Shiro was already looking at him. His heart filled with something unmanageably warm, aching deep within his chest.

“It’s good to have you back,” he mouthed the words along with himself on the screen.

“It’s good to be back,” Shiro whispered under his own voice.

Keith took a shaking deep breath in preparation for the next line. Shiro’s eyes in the darkness were reflecting the movement of themselves on the screen.

“I love you,” Keith said, quiet and deliberate.

Shiro’s mouth curled up helplessly at one end, just like it had in front of the cameras. “I love you too.”

After the movie had ended, after the crowd had applauded and speeches were said and Keith took a million more pictures than he had ever wanted to, after the limos were lined up before the theater waiting patiently to take them to the afterparty, Keith was still buoyant with something fresh inside of him. It was so bad, he couldn’t even feel the itch of his suit anymore. That was how all-encompassing his happiness was.

It was after all that that Shiro found him again. Easily and instinctively, their hands sought each other out and twined together.

“So,” Shiro said, crowding into Keith’s personal space, which Keith responded to with a grin, “wanna prove the tabloids right?”


End file.
